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Get Trump!

The Republican establishment is panicking about Trump’s runaway success. Robert Kagan, a neocon, announced in the Washington Post last week that if Trump secures the nomination, “the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton.” Max Boot, another neocon, says a “Trump presidency would represent the death knell of America as a great power.”

Justin Raimondo over at Antiwar.com makes some good comments about what’s behind this. I shall summarize…

Why do they hate Trump with such ferocity? The accusations of “racism” and the way he speaks without regard for upper class niceties doesn’t explain the intensity of the hatred coming from the journalistic wolf pack and the Washington crowd.

After all, shortly after Trump raised the issue of whether we should allow Muslims into the United States, the House of Representatives passed a bill– supported by mainline Republicans and Democrats – making it all but impossible for immigrants from Muslim countries to resettle here.

So where is all this vitriol coming from?

Some answers:

[1] Trump is loudly self-funding his own campaign. This tells the legions of K-Street lobbies to take a hike, thereby posing a mortal threat to the fund raising rackets that are the GOPs lifeblood.

[2] Trump is bombastically insisting that America is getting a bad deal everywhere in the world. While this is superficially about NAFTA and our $500 billion trade deficit with China, it is really an attack on the American Imperium.

The American people are tired of the endless neocon wars and the bloated military machine.

Trump is tapping a nationalist / isolationist impulse that runs deep among a weary and economically precarious main street public. And he articulates is ideas with what sounds like a trade protectionism.

Trump said, “If these politicians went to the beach and didn’t do a thing, and we had Saddam Hussein and Gadhafi in charge, instead of having terrorism all over the place – I mean, at least they killed terrorists, right? You look at Libya right now, ISIS, as we speak, is taking over their oil. It’s a total mess.”

This sums up not only the Trumpian foreign policy, but also Trump’s critique of the past twenty years. And to make things even scarier for the War Party, Trump wants us to pull back from policing the world so we can attend to domestic business.

Trump represents a deadly challenge to the high command of the War Party – the neoconservatives who lied us into war in Iraq.

These people are committed to maintaining Washington’s imperial pretensions, which think are jeopardized by Trump. They are behind the vicious smear campaign that equates Trump with Mussolini, Hitler, David Duke, and the Devil himself. They see that they are losing control of the GOP – their pathway to power – and they are reacting like the cornered rats they are.

A different commentator explains the bizarre popularity of Hillary Clinton among Black people.

Why do so many Black Americans support Hillary Clinton?

Stockholm Syndrome. They are faithful battered wives. They are yoked to Hillary by co-dependency: “I’ve stuck by you and suffered to do so for so long that you owe me, and I have faith that you will reward me later if I help you reach your goal now.”

In their minds they have no such guarantee from Bernie Sanders (and of course from Hillary such a guarantee is an illusion). Bernie Sanders has been successful without being dependent on Blacks up to now. So (again, in their minds) Sanders owes Blacks nothing, and therefore cannot be counted on to reward them after the election for their support during it.

I find it depressing to see so many Blacks chaining themselves so emotionally and naively to the Hillary personality cult, and feeling so uplifted by this delusion.

Meanwhile the Trump and Sanders campaigns are two wings of a general popular revulsion to the corporate-owned apparatchik management of the government.

Yesterday I noticed that February had twenty-nine days this year. So I turned on the TV for an explanation…

From 1830 until 1901, all calendars, time measurements, weights, measures, taxes anddollars in the USA were governed by laws issued by the U.S. Treasury.

Calendars, plus weights and measures, were overseen by a division of the Treasury called the Office of Standard Weights and Measures.

After 1901, the Treasury retained power over the dollar, but the responsibility for everything else was assigned to a new agency called the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) which is under the Dept. of Commerce.

Today the NIST is given almost a billion federal dollars a year to ensure sure that one inch equals one inch.

My point is that Monetary Sovereignty means the U.S. government decides what a “U.S. dollar” is, just as the government decides what a “gallon” is. Weights and measures vary between countries, which is why we speak of “U.S. gallons,” and “U.S. tons,” and so on. (Measurements of time, such as minutes or hours, are universally the same.)

The federal government issues laws governing dollars, and it creates dollars out of thin air. The government also influences exchange rates and interest rates. There are U.S. dollars all over the world, but the ultimate master of the dollar is the U.S. government.

Of course, we pretend that this is not the case. We pretend that U.S. government rules about money, weights, and measures must all obey the dictates of nature. We do this because we enjoy complaining that the U.S. government is “bankrupt” and has a “debt crisis.” We enjoy moaning that the “dollar is about to collapse.” We delight in wringing our hands about the fake “national debt crisis.”

We wail about these fake crises in order to avoid looking at real crises, such as student loan debt, or skyrocketing medical expenses.